TY - JOUR
T1 - Writing the Discipline
JF - Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences
SP - 392
LP - 427
DO - 10.1525/hsns.2016.46.3.392
VL - 46
IS - 3
AU - Simon, Josep
Y1 - 2016/06/01
UR - http://hsns.ucpress.edu/content/46/3/392.abstract
N2 - The historiography of physics has reached a great degree of maturity and sophistication, providing many avenues to consider the making of science from a historical perspective. However, the big picture of the making of physics is characterized by a predominant narrative focused on a conception of disciplinary formation through leadership transfers in research among France, Germany, and Britain. This focus has provided the history of physics with a periodization, a geography, and a fundamental goal commonly considered to be conceptual and theoretical unification. In this paper, I suggest the interest of reassessing this picture by analyzing the temporal, national, and epistemological viewpoint from which it is written. I use for this purpose an exemplary case study: Adolphe Ganot’s physics textbooks in France and their translation by Edmund Atkinson in England. In this context, I suggest future avenues for the study of the making of physics as a discipline, which consider the canonical role of textbooks in disciplinary formation beyond the Kuhnian paradigm.
ER -